Facebook Begins Testing Advanced Crowd-Sourced Content Moderation
In an effort to better remove inappropriate content, Facebook is testing out what it calls Facebook Community Council, according to new Council member and Boing Boing guest poster Andrea James. Like the name suggests, this app gives users the ability to evaluate content for various types of offensiveness, or as James quote the group’s motto: “To harness the power and intelligence of Facebook users to support us in keeping Facebook a trusted and vibrant community.”
We asked Facebook for more details — the company isn’t providing screenshots but a Facebook representative basically describes a crowd-sourced version of admin tools for moderating flagged content report by users.
The Facebook Community Council is a way for users to tell us whether reported content violates our policies. We’ve found that people aren’t shy about reporting content they come across that looks suspicious, and this is just another way of leveraging the Facebook community to help maintain the site’s trusted environment. It’s still in an experimental stage, and we’re currently testing the application with only a very small number of users.
The “Council” tools give members only one of the following eight options for each piece of objectionable content they are shown: Spam, Acceptable, Skip, Not English, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking (“direct attacks against public figures”) and Violence.
Facebook previously asked some users to add a crowd-sourcing application, called Translations, where they were asked to provide their own translations for different parts of the site. With a little help from professional translators, this app has made Facebook available in more than 70 languages. In the Council app, users results are averaged out over time in order to show items that are truly objectionable rather than objectionable in the minds of just a few people.
The new app won’t just give Facebook a better look at what sort of offensive content gets published on its service — it already has technology and a big customer service team working on the problem, after all. The company will also get better information about the sorts of content that people find offensive or not, and how those perceptions change over time.
[Top image via Boing Boing]
January 4th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
[...] Community Council is actually a Facebook app and tool for evaluating content for various offenses. Inside Facebook received a statement from Facebook, confirming that the company is looking to its community to help [...]
January 4th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
i appreciate your continous efforts to upgrade and make your services better for more facebook users… i support you 100%.. thanks
January 4th, 2010 at 9:38 pm
[...] Community Council is actually a Facebook app and tool for evaluating content for various offenses. Inside Facebook received a statement from Facebook, confirming that the company is looking to its community to help [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 1:56 am
[...] | InsideFacebook [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 4:03 am
[...] comes from InsideFacebook of the change, which sees Facebook moving towards a crowd-sourced model for conten moderation. [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 4:30 am
[...] Facebook testet gerade eine neues Feature mit der Bezeichnung „Facebook Community Council“. Das berichtet Inside Facebook. Der Sinn: Mitglieder sollen verstärkt auffällige und anstößige Inhalte melden und somit dabei [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 6:16 am
[...] Vía | .insidefacebook [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 9:21 am
[...] Vía | .insidefacebook [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 10:40 am
[...] testing some sort of “crowd-sourced content moderation.” (Inside Facebook). Whatever that is, it sounds scary… and I don’t want any part of [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 11:55 am
[...] to InsideFacebook.com, “[Facebook] isn’t providing screenshots but a Facebook representative basically describes [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Will be used by Democrats to get GOP content banned, and by GOPers to get Democrat stuff banned. And by the kids of Chinese Communists to get any criticism of the dictatorship banned.
January 5th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
[...] um sistema de moderação de conteúdos que contará com a ajuda de seus usuários. O blog Inside Facebook relata que um grupo de cadastrados, chamado Facebook Community Council (Conselho Comunitário do [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
[...] Facebook Begins Testing Advanced Crowd-Sourced Content Moderation, Inside Facebook [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
[...] dipatuhi penggunanya dalam mengupload content, baik gambar maupun tulisan. Dan ternyata menurut InsideFacebook, dalam menjaga aturan tersebut Facebook mulai melakukan crowdsourcing dengan membentuk Facebook [...]
January 6th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
[...] to InsideFacebook.com, “[Facebook] isn’t providing screenshots but a Facebook representative basically describes [...]
January 8th, 2010 at 12:55 am
[...] Facebook Community Council [...]